I’m trying to understand them a bit better, but it’s just not clicking for me. How is it able to operate like a physical computer and what is the benefit of that? Would you be able to say write an essay for your English class on a VM, save it there, and access it at a later time?
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A virtual machine is just another program running on your computer. What makes it interesting is that it’s pretending to be another, possibly different type of computer. As far as the programs running on the virtual machine know, they are using a real machine. They will, in general, behave exactly how they would on a real machine.
So why would you want to use a virtual machine? There’s a few reasons.
– A program you want to run was written for a different type of computer and it won’t run directly on yours.
– You are trying to simulate a more specialized type of computer, such as an old video game system.
– Security, you want to run a program but don’t want it to affect things outside the virtual machine environment.
– Research, you want to investigate something about a different type of computer without having to buy a full one.
– Testing, you want to test a program against various different configurations, making virtual machines with different settings is easier than setting up a bunch of real machines.
There are probably other reasons as well.
So why wouldn’t you want to use a virtual machine? There is generally a speed/performance penalty. Unless the virtual machine you are using is much older/slower than the host machine you will notice performance issues. It’s also more complex than just using your own machine directly. Unless you have a specific scenario that needs a virtual machine you’d be better of just using the computer you already have.
There are other pluses and minuses of virtual machines but hopefully that gets you started.
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